Following the green star

The Pasporta Servo (Passport Service) is a hospitality network for Esperanto speakers. Since my friend Andy and I are about to embark on a two-month trip to Europe, and because we're Esperantists, we thought we should take advantage of this great resource. There's just one problem: this year's edition of the address book hasn't been published yet. Normally it's published early in the year, but since they're making an online version of what was previously only a book, things got complicated, apparently.

Andy and I just posted a request for hosts on the lernu.net forums, and we've already gotten a response from a young guy near Paris who we can probably stay with for at least a few nights. Also, I decided to buy last year's edition of the Pasporta Servo, which Esperanto-USA was still offering for sale. I don't think using it will be a big problem; this year's version can't be very different. While I was buying Esperanto-related stuff, I also bought a little Esperanto flag and some buttons so other Esperantists can identify us. Seeing that flag just makes me so happy. I'm looking forward to staying with and befriending a lot of nice people.

To call friends and family at home or future friends in Europe at low, low rates, I set out to install the Internet telephony program Ekiga on our Eee PC. It wasn't as straightforward as I thought it would be, though. The EeeUser wiki has a whole big page about adding software repositories, but none of the ones listed on that page had Ekiga, so they were pretty useless. What to do, what to do?

I had read somewhere that the customized version of Xandros that runs on the Eee PC is based on Debian Etch, so I decided to add the Etch repositories to see what would happen. If my system got hosed, I could just reboot and restore everything to the factory configuration. So I added the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian etch main contrib

The EeeUser wiki page wasn't entirely useless. It taught me about the importance of pinning, which gives different priority levels to different repositories. I edited /etc/apt/preferences to give the standard Eee PC repositories a higher pin priority than the default 500:

Package: *
Pin: origin update.eeepc.asus.com
Pin-Priority: 950

Then I went to Synaptic to install Ekiga, but I kept getting an error message about being unable to parse /var/lib/dpkg/status. I tried some fixes as suggested on the wiki, but the problem persisted. I even restored the original settings, but to no avail. So I just tried using apt-get on the command line, and that worked. Apparently I also could have just scrolled down to Ekiga in Synaptic. The message apparently only comes up if I install a package after entering a search keyword.

Anyway, Ekiga seems to be working fine except for lag problems on my end and sound quality problems on other people's end. The latter, I hope, can be fixed by adjusting the equalization of the microphone, i.e., giving it more treble and less bass. But I can't seem to find a utility to do that. More research is needed. In the meantime, I have set Ekiga to start automatically, so friends and family who want to call me should be able to whenever the computer is on.

Self-explanatory: japanesebirdcookingspaghetti.com.

Dork Yearbook is a collection of dorky photos of dorks when they were dorky children. I'm glad I wasn't that dorky as a little kid. (Via waxy.org)

I should be working

I've been to the movies a few times lately. I saw Star Trek with my friends the Friday before last and again just this Sunday night. I'm proud to say I'd never watched any of the shows or the other movies because otherwise I'd be someone who watches Star Trek. Anyway, from the perspective of a complete outsider, the movie was good enough for me to see twice without getting bored. My friends and I also went to the midnight showing of Angels and Demons on Thursday night/Friday morning. It was pretty fast-paced, and I liked it. I didn't read the book.

In my last post, I talked about getting a new memory card for my digital camera. Well, I've discovered another benefit of having a large memory card. If you've seen my videos, you've seen the handiwork of my digital camera. The quality is pretty good, but it only records at something like 16 frames per second, so any motion looks pretty jerky. (Mmm... jerky.) I recently remembered that my camera has a higher-quality video setting that I couldn't use with my old memory card because it didn't have enough space. My 1 GB card can hold over 12 minutes of high quality video at 30 frames per second. It looks like it's from an actual camcorder. I could reach 8 GB sooner than I think.

For my upcoming trip, I've got a computer, but the keyboard is pretty small. This would be a problem for picture-taking because I name all my digital photos and videos to include the date, the number in the sequence for that day, and a brief description. After years of doing this manually, I wrote a Bash script to help me automate the task. It prompts me for a description for each photo or video and then moves it to the proper folder. Here's the script if you're interested.

11 Extinct Animals That Have Been Photographed Alive. (Via The Presurfer)

Ah, Area 51, a favorite subject of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Some goings-on at the base have recently been declassified, so several people have gone on the record to talk about what it was like to work at Area 51 and what some of those "UFOs" actually were. (Via waxy.org)

Through the glass eye

Hello, web site. I'm sorry I haven't been around lately. I've been spending a lot of time with that other site, the one that I get paid to work on. Ah yes, working from home is great except when you can't find time for it. I should be able to, but I have too much other stuff to explore. The computer is my playground, the Internet my sandbox. (The command line? Definitely the monkey bars.)

Next Tuesday (i.e., not this coming Tuesday but the one after it), I'll be going to Europe. Have I been preparing? I have. There's still some stuff to be done, but I've gotten things out of the way. I'm borrowing a large backpack, and my friend Andy and I already bought a netbook for traveling with. I don't expect to fall in love with it during the course of the trip,* and I don't think he will either, so our plan is to sell it when we get back.

I've also been accumulating some generally useful things that I'll want to keep when it's over. The main one I can think of right now is a memory card for my digital camera. When I got the camera in 2004, it came with a 16 MB card, which was virtually useless. I bought a 128 MB card along with it, and that has served me well for almost five years, allowing me to take roughly 64 to 72 photos at a time.

Since Europe is full of fantastic sights, I thought an upgrade would be deserved. I picked up a new 1 GB memory card on the cheap at a failing camera store. It should be good for at least 500 photos at a time. To put that in perspective, that's more pictures than I've taken since the beginning of last year. And because there's a good chance I'll take more than 500 pictures, I'll be relying on my trusty 8 GB flash drive that I recently picked up on the cheap from a failing electronics store. My new netbook has less than 2 GB of free space.

So what if I take more than 8 GB worth of photos? As ridiculous as the question seems, it has crossed my mind. Whenever I try to think about the logistics of storing 8 GB worth of photos, I suddenly remember how incredibly ridiculous it is, which saves me from having to think about it any longer. The flash drive is actually 8 hard-drive-vendor's gigabytes, i.e., about 7.5 actual gigabytes. All of the digital photos I've ever taken—4,150 between December 25, 2002, and May 3, 2009—add up to 6.2 GB. I think I'm good.

That said, in case I do take more than 7.5 GB worth of photos, I would probably upload them to my web space, where they would cost at least 10 cents an hour to store, and wait for my family to download them, which would cost me at least $2.50. Not too bad, I guess.

Okay, that's enough math. Now, the links.

Google has oodles of servers, but like many large companies, has never talked much about them... until now. They're pretty amazing little things that have battery backups in case the power goes out. (Via The Presurfer)

The Free Music Archive is my kind of thing: it aims to be an "interactive library of high-quality, legal audio downloads." The music is released under Creative Commons licenses and other licenses that allow sharing.

From another blog, it's a continually updated collection of negative Amazon reviews of classic books, movies, and albums: You Can't Please Everyone. (Via J-Walk Blog)

*subject to change

Welcome back, Conky

For a relatively long time, I used Conky as a system monitor on my desktop. It's pretty popular among Ubuntu users and other Linux types. Eventually, I switched to Screenlets, mainly because they look snazzy. But since my Screenlets have been acting up lately (spontaneously losing their configurations when I log in), I decided I'd have enough of that. I've gone back to Conky and all its powerful features. To that end, I've spent hours on what I believe is a pretty sexy Conky setup. Click the thumbnail for the full-size version.

The wallpaper is from InterfaceLIFT. The semi-transparent background for Conky is actually part of the wallpaper. I made a transparent image with a black stripe down the side in the GIMP and overlaid it on the original wallpaper with ImageMagick, which will make things easier when I want to change the wallpaper later. As for the Conky configuration itself, it's pretty self-explanatory. Here's my .conkyrc, and here's a Bash script I wrote to make audio metadata from Rhythmbox look pretty whether you're playing a song, a podcast, an Internet radio stream, or nothing at all.

And now, the not-so-boring links:

The difference between Pixar's and DreamWorks' animated films explained.

Wrong Tomorrow documents predictions made by public figures and keeps track of whether they become wrong or right. (Via waxy.org)

NPR did an interesting story recently on how ants know when their fellow ants are dead. As with many such things, it has to do with a chemical, which you can use to really confuse them.

A sweet end

End-of-year things have been going on. Last Monday, I presided over the last Esperanto Club meeting of the year. Not a lot of people showed up, but I guess that can be expected since people had to study for exams and do more important end-of-year things. We had elections, but no one was challenged, so they were kind of pointless. Still, you've got to respect the democratic process.

Last Thursday, Get Carded had its year-end dinner at Bento Cafe, a hip Asian place. This year, they'd been awarding points to people for volunteering a certain number of hours at events. The member with the most points at the end of the year would get a gift card for the restaurant of their choice. I was the frontrunner all year, so Michael and Jehan, the guys in charge, already asked me what restaurant I wanted a gift card for. And on Thursday night, I was awarded Volunteer of the Year (defending my title from last year) with a gift card good for Chili's, Macaroni Grill, and a couple of other places whose names I can't be bothered to remember because I'm too lazy to take the gift card out of my wallet even though I could have taken it out and checked in the time it's taken me to write this.

Saturday night was a Gator Freethought party. I was only able to go to a few of their meetings this year due to scheduling conflicts, so I thought I'd make up for it by going to a party at the former president's house. It was fun; there were games, political debates, and s'mores. I wish I had gone to more of those parties.

Oh, and exams. My first exam was yesterday, a whole week after classes ended. I think I did well. My other two were today. In fact, the exams I expected to be harder were easier and the one I expected to be easier was harder. Is that ironic? It might be Alanis Morissette ironic, but I don't think it's really ironic.

For my discrete math class, we got to choose our own grade distribution (according to certain guidelines), so I took advantage of that by writing a program that would find the best grade distribution for me. I gave it a few possible values for my final exam grade and went for one of the distributions that weighed my final somewhat heavily but not as heavily as possible. It made getting an A pretty easy without the risk of getting a very bad grade if I somehow bombed the final. I shared my program with my classmates, and at least some of them used it, which was cool.

After that exam, which was my last, my roommate moved out, and I'm now left in a half-empty room till Saturday. But all is not lost. I planned a date with my new friend. We hadn't met for a while due to various things (mainly exams) getting in the way, but things worked out tonight. We went to Chop Stix, a pan-Asian place, for dinner, and it was delightful. I'd like to see her again before I go home, and I might.

And, well, that's basically it. I guess it's time to put this year to bed. I'll be moving out on Saturday, and I'll probably get home Sunday.

If world leaders were on Facebook, they would probably have a Facebook group for world leaders.

The Benny Hillifier makes any video sillier by substituting the audio with that sax tune from The Benny Hill Show.

You know you need to put your comic strip to bed when you reuse artwork and/or jokes from decades ago. Recently, Blondie and The Family Circus have been caught doing just that. (Via J-Walk Blog)

The 5th semiannual Ubuntu upgrade post

Ah, the thrill of the upgrade. The excitement of downloading all-new versions of your favorite software, and the very real possibility that your entire system could get hosed. After a series of relatively uneventful upgrades, I wondered when my luck would run out.

So Ubuntu 9.04 (insert codename that no one likes here) came out on Thursday. As I've been doing for the past few upgrades, I downloaded the alternate install CD (although I used BitTorrent this time).

Once I got that going, the actual upgrade went pretty smoothly... until the end, when Ubuntu said that the installation failed due to a broken package. It was Bonager, an old program I installed from a third-party .deb package and used for a while but wasn't using anymore. I went to Synaptic and it told me to try sudo apt-get -f install, but that didn't work. After some Googling, I found this, which got rid of the program.

sudo update-rc.d -f bonager remove
sudo rm /etc/init.d/bonager
sudo dpkg -P --force-all bonager

Thinking that was over with, I went to the Update Manager to see if there were any new updates since the release. The Upgrade Manager told me I had to do a partial upgrade, presumably because of the broken package mess. I started that, and it asked me to insert a CD. I hit cancel, and it continued for a bit but then stopped without explanation. I tried again, and the partial upgrade would start but then the window would disappear. I tried it on the command line (sudo apt-get dist-upgrade) and the reason was that there were more broken packages, presumably caused by the breakage of the first one. sudo apt-get -f install actually fixed the problem, and I ran the upgrade again on the command line without any problems.

The ordeal caused me a lot of grief, but at least there weren't sharks involved.

I like the new version of Ubuntu. There haven't been too many funky changes to trip me up, and there have been some little improvements here and there. You can now change gedit's syntax highlighting from the status bar; Rhythmbox's gapless playback allows songs to finish; Transmission allows bandwidth limit scheduling. As usual, Ubuntu has thrown in some new fonts, but I actually like them. They're the Liberation fonts, which are apparently metric-compatible with certain popular fonts. They also look pretty slick, like you'd find them in a book or magazine that was trying to look cool. And the new pop-up notifications aren't that bad. I just wish I could customize them. The little preferences app does nothing.

Some reviews I've read assert that subtle improvements have made the Ubuntu experience better overall, and I find myself agreeing. Maybe it's just my imagination, but OpenOffice.org and Firefox even seem a bit zippier. It's almost as if Firefox is saying, "Yes, Jordon, install as many extensions as you want!!"

Probably my favorite improvement is the inclusion of Ekiga 3.2, which has buddy list capabilities so you can actually see whether other people are online. At this juncture I'd like to renew my perennial plea for Ekiga contacts. You know, just say hi or something. I'm sip:jordon@ekiga.net. Pretty easy to remember. (It's also available for Windows!) I really wish there were something like a "Skype Me" forum for SIP users. I've even thought of creating something like that myself. Seriously, there must be some people who use SIP for fun, right? How are they supposed to contact each other?

Clerkdogs provides movie recommendations from former video store clerks. The recommendations are supposed to be all the better for it. (Via The Presurfer)

Here's a USA Sitcom Map showing the settings of sitcoms across the country. There's a whole map for New York City as well. (Via waxy.org)

The end is near

It wants to be summer. It wants to be summer so bad. It's actually been hot the past few days, and I'm thinking of old summer memories. If there's one thing I am, it's nostalgic.

The last day classes was Wednesday, and it could not have come sooner. I had my last exam for digital logic on Tuesday. I didn't do as well as I hoped to, but with the inevitable curve, which the professor says should be "substantial," I'll have a B. My other exams are all on Wednesday and Thursday, and I leave next Saturday.

One aspect of on-campus life that I've never taken advantage of is the swimming pools. There are several here, at least two of which are located near dorms, and at least one of which is located near my dorm. It's across the street, in fact. I've just never gone because of the weather (most of the time I'm here, there's a risk of having to wear a sweater) and I guess because I usually wouldn't have someone to go with. But some of my friends from the dorm want to go soon, and I happened to be thinking the same thing.

24-hour quiet hours went into effect at midnight Thursday. In my experience, the continual quiet forces an anticlimactic ending to a year of life in the dorms. People take will take exams over the course of the next week (they start tomorrow and run through next Friday, excepting Sunday) and, being unable to laugh and shout and have a good time, quietly disappear. Inevitably, I am one of the last to leave. I just happen to pick classes that have late exams, and I live so far away that my parents can't swing up and get me whenever they want.

I'll actually be one of the last to leave this time, but for once, a lot of other people are checking out on Saturday morning. So maybe this last week won't be too quiet.

One of my pet peeves is hearing compression artifacts in digital audio. It's distracting and unnecessary now that we have high-bandwidth connections and better audio formats that make MP3 obsolete. It turns out that not everyone cares about fidelity as much as I do. In fact, a Stanford music professor has found that in six years' worth of listening tests, his students have shown an increased preference for low-bitrate MP3s over their higher-quality counterparts. One explanation is that people like what they're used to, and many young people are used to stuffing their iPods with every MP3 they can find and taking them on the go. This also explains why some people think vinyl sounds better. It actually doesn't, of course; they're just used to hearing music that way.

Some guy called Doug Nufer wrote a book called Never Again. Each word in the book is used only once. Talk about a constrained writing experiment; it's actually almost 200 pages. And it looks like the second word is "the." Tough. (Via J-Walk Blog)

This is probably something I would do. The BBC reports: "A Finnish computer programmer who lost one of his fingers in a motorcycle accident has made himself a prosthetic replacement with a USB drive attached." The article has a picture. (And the prosthetic is detachable, which is good because he'd probably want more than 2 GB eventually.)

E-E-E

Oh, honey, he's teasing you. Nobody has two television sets.

I haven't talked much here about my upcoming trip to Europe with my friends, but believe me, it is still going to happen. I've been making arrangements bit by bit. I've bought a plane ticket and a train ticket already. But since I'm going to be gone for over two months, I felt that there should be something more.

I've decided to keep my job while I'm on vacation. I'm a webmaster here at school. I also happen to blog as a hobby. ("Really?") I also like to take pictures with my digital camera... do you see where this is going?

I need a laptop.

I do have a laptop. I've been using my Dell Inspiron E1505N since I got it almost two years ago. But it's big and heavy. It has all personal information on it, so I'd hate for it to get lost in a foreign country. It was kind of expensive, so I wouldn't want to have to replace it. It's also fragile; I've come close to breaking it while carrying it around.

So, for my trip, I'd need a laptop that's the opposite of all that—one that's small, light, ad hoc, cheap, and sturdy. Fortunately, the market has answered. I am speaking, of course, of that newly popular class of PCs, the netbook.

Since Andy and I will be traveling as a duo for much of the time, we talked about the possibility of buying a netbook together, sharing it during the trip, and selling it after we get back. I did a bit of research and found a barely used one in my immediate area for $250. It had basically everything I wanted: a low-capacity solid-state drive, a Linux-based operating system, good battery life, and of course, small size. It's an ASUS Eee PC 4G, and today, it is mine ours. Craigslist does it again!

Apparently, the woman selling it got it as a gift and didn't want it because she already has a laptop. I can sympathize. I had a hard time convincing myself that I should buy a second laptop, even a cheap one that I would only have for a short time. I figured it would be tantamount to declaring my two-year-old laptop obsolete, and that computer cost too much for me to take it out of service so early.

After using the Eee PC, I've set aside those concerns. The netbook is for casual use only. The 800x480 screen is almost too small for web browsing, and the keyboard is almost too small for typing. (In fact, I haven't switched the layout to Dvorak because I need my fingers to move around more!) It's not the most pleasant experience, but you can manage in a pinch. And dang if it isn't convenient.

So, during our 68-day pinch, it should get the job done just fine. It'll be much better than not blogging, not being able to take lots of photos, and not making money. Now, I'll just have to show it to Andy and see what he thinks. I'm pretty sure he'll like it. Also, he owes me $125.

Here's a fun mashup for your listening and viewing pleasure: Mother of All Funk Chords. (Via Lessig Blog)

Recently, an old portrait that might be of Shakespeare has come to light. If it's actually of him, it would change the little that we know about his life. But those of you who like a little mystery in your Elizabethan poet-playwrights need not be concerned because we'll probably never know one way or the other.

10

I alluded to this last time, but it deserves its own post.

Two weeks ago, I responded to a personal ad. I do this sometimes. This time, though, it was different. We started e-mailing each other, but the conversation didn't peter out. We made the jump to instant messaging and Facebook. Today, we met.

It was a beautiful day: bright and sunny but not too hot. I waited at the corner of University and 13th, where a traveler and her dog were already sitting. The dog was friendly. Like a typical dog, it apparently liked to chew on things. It went to town on my hand. But I like dogs, so it was okay.

Just then, she appeared. My hand wet with dog slobber, we started talking. I was worried that it would be awkward at first, but it was just like we knew each other well. We headed toward the restaurant we had planned to go to only to find that it was closed for Easter. We went further down the road and found just about every place closed. This was something we hadn't planned for.

Alas, Ben & Jerry's was open. No one was there except for one employee. I washed my hands and we had delicious sundaes that we almost finished while talking about stuff.

Then we decided to walk through campus, which was basically empty because it was Sunday and Easter to boot. We made it to the Plaza of the Americas, where we sat at a bench under a tree and talked more—for at least an hour, I believe—until she had to go.

We will meet again.

And now, well, how about Ask Jordon?

Mr. Hi: How did the word "Hi" originate. Hello? I get the "H" but why "i"?

I was actually wondering this recently too. Wiktionary, which has recently become my online dictionary of choice, says of the etymology: "American English (first recorded reference is to speech of a Kansas Indian), originally to attract attention, probably a variant of Middle English hy, hey (circa 1475) also an exclamation to call attention." So apparently it comes from Native Americans, who picked it up from English? There's no citation.

Because of the economy and all that dumb stuff, we've been hearing a lot about large amounts of money. In particular, the trillion is having its day. But what does a trillion dollars actually look like? Find out! (And should it be "What do a trillion dollars..."? I think they both sound funny, but it seems like the former is correct!)

This is quickly becoming a popular site for people to share embarrassing, yet humorous, real-life stories in brief: FMyLife.

Given the product placement, this might just be a PR stunt disguised as an amateur project, but it's still cool. Basically, some folks put together an unbelievably fast computer. Watch for when they drop a DVD case from the window and start ripping the DVD at the same time. The rip wins. (Via J-Walk Blog)

From Hogtown to Cowford

On Thursday, Get Carded held its third annual Lifeapalooza concert at the Orange and Brew, a coffeehouse on campus. It was similar to last year's, which is to say that a lot of people signed up to be organ donors. 52, in fact.

This year, rather than keeping track of how many people were entering the building, I mainly concerned myself with talking about organ donation to people as they made their way in. Unlike at our general tabling events, the people who weren't already organ donors were all willing to sign up.

Like last year, we were planning to have the attendees hold green glow sticks and stand in a ribbon shape to make a human green ribbon for organ donation, but that didn't happen. I think it was because the weather was fickle (it was very windy and it rained for a little while). Still, the turnout was good, and the music was good too. I think everybody had a good time.

I had a pretty boring day on Saturday. Around 8:00 at night, I was just pondering how boring my day had been when my friend Evan called. He wanted to go to Jacksonville in search of mozzarella sticks and live music. He had never been there, and neither had I for any significant amount of time, but I didn't need much convincing to go along.

After chatting about all kinds of things during the 90-minute drive, we parked downtown and went to the Landing, a place I had heard of. There was a band playing, and we found an American-type restaurant that had mozzarella stars, which were actually kind of triangular. After those and some chicken strips with french fries, we were satisfied. We took a few pictures to remember the trip by and went back to Gainesville.

Also, The World of Stuff is 6 years old today. Happy birthday, TWoS!

Yet another cool list from Wikipedia that will probably be deleted within six months: List of inventors killed by their own inventions.

Apparently, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has always been crazy... and bald. See him pitch Windows 1.0.

Radio broadcaster Paul Harvey died recently. He was known to deliver amusing stories that no one else covered... because they were made up. He also put a misleading spin on some of his stories. That's what a reporter found in 1997 after investigating some of his fishy tales.